7 quick takes....

31 August

7 quick takes....

It is spring, but it looked like autumn and felt like summer.

Good afternoon! This morning didn’t go entirely according to plan, but not in a bad way. Usually on a Monday, I write my blog first thing in the morning. That was my plan for today too but there was no electricity and my laptop’s battery works for about five minutes. Since it’s an old computer it will need those five minutes to wake up and by the time it’s up and running, the battery is drained. So instead of waiting for the power to come back I decided to go outside to clean the pig’s sty and the duck pool. Since it involves a lot of lugging water, turds and soil, it’s a great work out too. Win! Now the power is back and I can write about all the big and small things that happened last week.
While I was cleaning the animal’s houses, the girls were playing ‘petting zoo’. They made entrance tickets, prepared little bowls of food so that the kids could feed the animals and came up with other activities for the imaginary visitors to their zoo. They learned about petting zoos in a book they were reading and loved the idea. ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if there was something like that close to us?’ Sophie asked. I laughed. She basically lives in a petting zoo.
‘Where is your mom?’ I am walking on our beach and the question comes from an elderly man. He is carrying a cooler bag. I must have looked surprised, so he asks again: ‘Where is your mom?’ I tell him that my mom isn’t here. ‘Can you please call her? I have some fish and maybe she wants some for supper?’He points at the bag, I guess that that's where the fish is. I start to laugh… the girls are not with me, so he probably doesn’t realise that I am the mom. But I don’t look that young, do I? I explain that my mom is in the Netherlands but that in my house, I am ‘the mom’ who decides what’s for supper. He looks at me with disbelieve in his eyes ‘are you sure?’ he says. But he doesn’t give me the chance to get too happy about appearing to be younger than I am. ‘If you’re a mom, you shouldn’t put on clothes like that.’ He points at my shorts( that wouldn’t even be considered to be very short in most cultures). ‘It’s not decent for a mom…’ and he walks away.
Last week was exactly what I needed. I started the week feeling homesick and googling flights and ways to get to Europe. Not a good space to be in right now. Fortunately by the time the week was over I had found peace, and even excitement about the fact that this is where we are right now. That doesn’t mean that I am not happy about the airports that are allegedly opening up, and that I won’t try to go when I get an opportunity, but I am glad to be here and have found a purpose in being here. It’s funny how God just knows what you need. On Wednesday I left Senga Bay for a few days to film and document stories for ‘Red een Kind’; a Dutch NGO. And while I was there, sitting on the ground and playing with toys that were made by some children, ankle deep in a rice field while interviewing a farmer and trying to hold back tears of joy while I heard many stories of improved lives, I knew why I am here. This week will be all about working out all the stories. I need to edit the movie that I made, sort the pictures and turn the interviews into readable stories. So exciting!
Another something that lifted my moods was our first dive! Friends of ours have a dive school in Nkatha Bay and from when we got to know them we said that we would dive with them. There many beautiful and interesting fish in Lake Malawi so learning it here, with people we know in a place we love, seemed like a good idea. The place where I had to film is a four-hour drive away from us but quite close to Nkatha Bay so after I was done on Friday, Hartmut and the girls came too, and we had a wonderful weekend away in ‘the bay’. And, we did our first dive! First we got all the theory and when they, after that, equipped us with all the gear, I felt a little overwhelmed. So many things to remember. What if I would forget? What if I would panic? But once we were under the water, it all seemed so straight forward and cool. It was so much better than I expected it to be. We saw many different fish and interesting aquascapes. Part of David Attenborough’s 'planet earth' and 'seven worlds, one planet' series is filmed right where we were diving and it was amazing to see the places that we knew from the screen in real life. Hartmut loved the technical side of things, and he was constantly trying the different things that the equipment could do while I just enjoyed it to float around and see the fish. I don’t think this will be our last dive.
Sometimes you wonder how you got yourself into certain situations. Like Thursday morning, when I sat in a taxi too full to be comfortable, next to a crying man who was telling me his life story while downing one beer after the other. Actually, I do know how I got there. We were on our way to the project for another day of work when the car broke down. Since we were on a pretty tight schedule we decided to get a taxi. Most of them were already full but after a while we got one. As I got in, I already realised that my new neighbour was pretty drunk, at nine am, and working hard to intensify the state he was in. He caught me looking at him as he opened the next bottle with his teeth. ‘Why are you looking? Do you also want one?’ he offered. I kindly declined and said that it was a bit too early for beer. He did not agree. ‘It’s in my best interest. I read somewhere that beer kills corona, so the more I drink, the smaller the chance is that I get it.’ Great excuse, but I doubt it to be true. We started chatting anyway. Or rather; he started chatting and I started listening and during the following 20 kilometres I learned his rather tragic life story. Then we arrived in a small village where he handed a guy some cash to go and get more beer. He had just told me that he had lost his job and that he found it hard that people don’t take him serious so when he got more beer he clearly felt the need to excuse himself. He said ‘it’s out of the goodness of my heart that I buy this. This people need an income so by buying beer from them, I help their businesses' while he opened the fourth bottle. I was glad that it wasn’t long after that, that we reached our destination. He started to declare his undying love and asked if I could please remove my mask so that he could see my face (that felt about as indecent as if he had asked me to remove my top. Funny how quickly that changes). It was better to get on with my day and let him, and his beer, alone. I hope he reached his destination in one piece and I hope that he was sober enough to attend the wedding that he was going to.
Time to get going. Hopefully the power stays on because it has been a bit erratic while writing this blog. Have a great week!